Silver Falls

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of going for a 2.5km or so walk each day, because I am simply not getting enough exercise. Today was a holiday and my plans were to do some work and escape to have a walk. Unfortunately I seemed to hit an attitude problem with work, which wouldn’t be so bad except that I could have wasted the day much more creatively and interestingly if I had known!

At least I managed my little escape, up to Fern Tree on Mt Wellington. I just went for a stroll along the Pipeline Track and picked up a few caches on my return journey. I detoured up to Silver Falls, because it is a pretty spot and there was a cache to be found (which also needed its saturated logbook replacing, which I have duly done). The falls themselves aren’t very tall (maybe 5m or so), but there was plenty of water coming over, and so I stopped to try some time exposure photographs, even though I only had my little camera and was bracing myself against a tree fern trunk for stability. Some of the shots turned out quite well, but I confess I knew that my efforts will likely be upstaged by the guy taking photos downstream with an SLR, a long lens and a tripod.

I can vaguely remember family outings here where my grandmother and/or mother taught us kids how to make little waterwheels out of bits of fern branch and bark. You take a piece of the stem of a fern frond (about 25cm long), and cut four 2cm slits through it in the middle 15cm or so, each one at an angle to its neighbours (right angles will do the trick). You then slide a strip of firm bark right through each slit so that half of the bark strip is on each side of the stem. This gives you four double-ended paddles, each offset from the ones on either side. Now you have to find a deep enough stretch of creek, with two suitable piles of rocks about 20cm apart, so that you can balance the ends of the fern stem on the rocks, free to turn, with the tips of the paddles in the flow, in order that the whole stem axle with its set of paddles turns freely. (Make sense?)

Anyway, happy memories in a lovely location.